Punjab was the second last territorial addition to British India. The ground realities here were different and the primary British concern was geopolitics rather than commerce. Education under colonial auspices followed a different route in Punjab than elsewhere. In Bengal, the British had the convenience of dealing with a new social class which had become wealthy through European connection and was favourably inclined towards English language. In contrast, in Punjab the British had to come to terms with the old aristocracy which had no major interest in English. In fact, the enthusiasm which Calcutta and its hinterland as well as the city of Bombay showed for English was not visible anywhere else in the country. In Bengal, the East India Company had been very keen to impart Western education and thought to the Indians through the medium of English. In Punjab however the officials who wanted the oriental languages to be recognized and respected gained ascendancy and successfully enlisted the support of the nobility and the gentry.

In the early years the colonial administration had kept the missionaries and the Christianity enthusiasts in its own ranks on a tight leash lest their evangelical zeal produce a backlash. However, by the mid 19th century such fears had passed. Missionary activity was strictly prohibited in the British India territories till the 1823 Charter gave permission to the British missionaries. The next Charter in 1833 extended the concession to non-British missions. Taking advantage of this, American Presbyterians opened a Mission in Ludhiana, on the outskirts of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, in 1834. The Lodiana Mission as it was called opened a church in 1837 as well as a school.

Significantly the first ever English school in Lahore was a missionary school. As if in anticipation of the Punjab events, the American Presbyterian Rev. Charles William Forman (1821-1894) who had arrived in India in 1847 moved to Lahore in 1849. Many British military officers felt that since they had conquered Punjab, their own missionaries should work here. Accordingly the Anglican Church Missionary Society arrived in Punjab in 1852 and since the Americans were already ensconced in Lahore chose to make Umritsur [Amritsar] their centre. Both the sets of missionaries worked together harmoniously, receiving handsome help and assistance from high Government functionaries at official and personal levels.

In December 1849 Forman opened an English school in Lahore with three students who were taught under a tree. In 1853, the school settled in a palace known as Rang Mahal which lent its name to the School. Both Lahore and Amritsar displayed remarkable anxiety for learning English. Many Punjabi ‘noblemen and gentlemen’ made private arrangements for teaching English to their sons, and ‘many natives of Bengal who possess a smattering of English find employment as teachers’. The government opened a school in Amritsar in 1849-50 ( because Lahore already had the Mission School), with English, Hindi, Persian, Arabic and Gurmukhi departments. Within a year, the school came to have a daily attendance of about 150. About one fourth of the students enrolled for English. ‘The Seikh students of Goormukhee’ were about one fifth of the total. Among the Sikhs, ‘the prevailing caste’ was Jat; among the Hindus Khatris and Brahmins. There was similarly a flourishing English school in Rawalpindi, ‘supported with the sanction of the citizens by a surplus town duty proceeds’. Both the Amritsar and the Rawalpindi schools were handed over to the missionaries.

From 1849 till 1853, Punjab was governed by a Board of Administration, with education placed under the charge of the Judicial Commissioner. This is how [Sir] Robert Montgomery (1809-1887) who held office as Lieutenant Governor 1859-1865) came to introduce the new education system. In February 1853, the system of governance was changed with the appointment of a Chief Commissioner, and education assigned (in September 1854) to the Financial Commissioner, Donald Friell McLeod (1810-1872) who subsequently (1865-1870) served as the Lieutenant Governor. In January 1856 a Department of Public Instruction was established with William Delafield Arnold (1829-1859) as its first Director. After his death the appointment went to Abraham Richard Fuller (1828-1867) who held office from 1860 till death. These early names are important because there were medals and scholarships instituted in their name.

A cess of one per cent of the land tax was attached to the education department for meeting government expenditure on education and for giving grant-in-aid to approved schools. The Government focused its attention on village schools while English education at district level was left to the Mission schools. By 1857, the Anglican Mission was running schools in Amritsar, Peshawar, Kangra, Kotgarh, and Ferozepur Cantonment, while the Presbyterians had schools in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Jullundur, Ludhiana, Sialkot, Ambala City and Ambala Cantonment. Most of these were aided by the Government. Satisfied that the schools were providing ‘a sound secular education’, the Government gave them aid. It ‘takes no cognizance of and certainly offers no opposition to’ their teaching the Christian religion.

One of the very first administrative decisions taken by the British in Punjab concerned language. In the Sikh kingdom period, Persian had been the language of the court and of public business. Between 1851 and 1854, Persian was officially replaced not with Punjabi but with Urdu in Persian script. With the 1857 decline of Delhi and Lucknow, Lahore emerged as the main centre of Urdu literary activities. In Punjab, missionary and government educational efforts came to complement each other. The government focused on vernacular education at village level and the missionaries on the English. For the missionaries, English education was not an end in itself but as a means towards effecting conversions. When some students were baptized, there was a severe backlash and students were withdrawn. Hindus were not too enamoured of Urdu which they identified with Muslims rather than the province. This is how the government’s initiative for secular English education emerged, and Hindus took steps to introduce English for their children in combination with Hindi and Sanskrit rather than Urdu. The identification of language ( Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi) with religious communities ( Muslim, Sikh, Hindu) would produce far-reaching consequences in colonial Punjab and later in Indian Punjab.

More than a decade after the Presbyterian initiative, Lahore got, in 1860, a Government High School. In the meantime in 1858, Delhi was transferred from the North West Province to Punjab. Two Government Colleges were opened in Punjab in 1864 as affiliates of Calcutta University. While the one at Lahore (established 1 January 1864) went from strength to strength, the one opened in Delhi remained short-lived. It was closed in 1877, and the students and faculty transferred to Lahore. It was only in 1881 that Delhi got a new College, St Stephen’s, which was affiliated to Calcutta University. But as soon as Punjab University was instituted, the affiliation was transferred, Finally, in 1922 the College became an affiliate of the newly founded Delhi University . There was another unsuccessful attempt at college education. The (Rang Mahal) Mission School opened College classes in 1866, but they were closed in 1869 because of poor response. Lahore Mission College was finally opened in 1886 and renamed Forman Christian College in 1894.

Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (1840-1899) was selected as the Principal of Government College Lahore on the basis of an open advertisement in London newspapers rather than being handpicked by bureaucrats. He was an able linguist and at the time a lecturer in Arabic and Muslim Law at King’s College London. He arrived in Lahore in November 1864. As early as 21 January 1865, he took the lead in establishing a vernacular literary society Anjuman-i-Punjab with the twin objective of the ‘revival of ancient Oriental learning’ and ‘the diffusion of useful knowledge’ ‘through the medium of the Vernacular’. The Anjuman which counted among its members not only the officials but also influential citizens, was in the forefront in campaigning for the establishment of an Oriental University.

As a prelude to a full-fledged university, Punjab University College Lahore was opened in 1870 and provided with a representative governing body called the Senate which included the chief donors or their representatives. The same year it established two important institutions: Oriental School renamed Oriental College in 1872; and Law School. The University College could conduct examinations, and grant scholarships. It could award certificates but not degrees for which one had to separately write Calcutta University examinations. The University College was entrusted with conducting examinations for the Medical School as well.

It is no coincidence that the nationalist Punjab newspaper The Tribune came up a year before the University did. The paper set up in 1881 became a powerful and successful forum to ensure that the new University was not entirely ‘Oriental’ but also imparted Western education through the medium of English. Although Leitner and his associates did not fully succeed in their stated mission, the fourth University in India which came up on 14 October 1882 differed in many ways from the three preceding Presidency town universities all established in 1857. While the earlier universities was named after towns, it was named after a geographical entity. While the Calcutta, Bombay and Madras Universities at the time were merely examining bodies, the Punjab was in addition a teaching University also. It awarded English-based degrees like the preceding universities, but it also made provision ‘for duly recognizing and honouring proficiency in literature and science in the case of those unacquainted with English [italics in original]. A person who had passed various examinations in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, etc. could piecemeal write additional examinations and finally obtain the B.A. degree. Such a degree was jocularly known as ‘B.A. via Bathinda’. The expression probably rose because Bathinda was (and is) a major train junction in the (Indian) Punjab with connection to many small stations so that anyone who managed to reach Bathinda would eventually reach his destination. Jokes apart, it was significant that the Punjab University bestowed its mainstream degrees through a parallel route.

Table 1 lists some of the landmarks in the 19th century history of English education in Punjab.

Table 1. English education in Punjab: Some important dates 1827-1910

1825-1857

Government Delhi College.

1834

American Presbyterian Lodiana [Ludhiana] Mission established. A school established in 1837.

1849 Dec.

Mission School opened in Lahore by the American Presbyterian missionary Charles William Forman; shifted to the Rang Mahal palace in 1853.

1851 May

Government opens a school in Amritsar; subsequently handed over to the American Mission.

1856 Jan.

Punjab Education department set up under Director of Public Instruction.

The Punjab University Lahore became part of Pakistan at the time of Partition, while most students and teachers migrated to India. It had been naively expected that the Lahore University would conduct the examinations for both parts of the Punjab even after Partition, but that was not to be. To protect the interests of the large number of school and college students suddenly left without an examining body, East Panjab University, as it was then called, was ‘hustled into an unceremonious birth’ through the promulgation of an ordinance on 20 October 1947, under a provisional Syndicate, without even a Vice-Chancellor leave aside any infrastructure. (Panjab was advisedly spelt with an initial ‘a’ to distinguish the new University from the old. Both the State and the University dropped the appellation East on 26 January 1956.)

Two of the Vice Chancellors of the Panjab University, Dewan Anand Kumar and Ram Chand Paul, had been in service in the Punjab University Lahore.The first two Vice-Chancellors, both former members of the Syndicate of the Lahore University, were part-time and short-term. Justice Teja Singh, a puisne judge of the Punjab High Court, was formally appointed honorary Vice Chancellor four months after the establishment of the University, that is on 9 February 1948. He however resigned on 31 March 1949 to devote full time to his new office of Chief Justice of PEPSU ( Patiala and East Punjab States Union) High Court, which he had accepted in November 1948. He however continued to be an active member of the University Syndicate. His successor, Mr G.C. Chatterjee of the Indian Education Service, and Director of Public Instruction, East Punjab, held office only for four months ( 1 April – 31 July 1949) as he was elevated to the membership of the Union Public Service Commission.

The appointment now went to Dewan Anand Kumar ( 1894-1981) who remained at the helm of affairs for eight long and crucial years (1 August 1949- 30 June 1957). Educated in Cambridge, Anand Kumar was appointed a reader in zoology in 1920 , and head of the department in 1942 at Lahore. In 1946 he was made the Dean of University Instruction, a post he continued to hold in the new University.

Extremely wealthy in his Lahore days through his inheritance of a 6000 acre landed estate, aristocratic, well-connected, benevolent, imbued with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, and related to the Nehrus through ties of marriage (Brij Kumar Nehru was his sister’s son), Kumar ( affectionately and reverentially known as the Dewan Sahib in his time) is the true builder of the university as we know it today.

The turbulence of the early Panjab University is brought home by the fact that it was funded not only by the state government and the central education ministry but also by the central ministry for rehabilitation. After remaining ina crowded Shimla for a short period, the administrative offices were shifted to Solan cantonment where they were housed in hill-top barracks spread over an area of about eight kilometers.

Restoration of teaching was not an easy task. Since there was no institution in Punjab with facility for science practicals, physics, chemistry and chemical engineering classes were started in Delhi. Since Delhi now had a large number of Punjabi refugees who wanted further education, Panjab University was permitted to intrude into Delhi University’s jurisdiction and start a Camp College, which could offer instruction only in the evenings because the two school buildings it was located in ran their own classes during day time. The College even set up a hostel in 150 small canvas tents pitched in the grounds. It is in the Camp College that the journalism department was restarted in 1948, which borrowed the services of eminent journalists as faculty.

For the rest, the University had to fall back on its own affiliated colleges. Zoology was shifted to Government College Hoshiarpur, while botany and pharmacy were hosted by Khalsa College Amritsar, which also accommodated Punjabi. The unusualness of the times can be gauged from the fact that for full 11 years the University Punjabi department within the Khalsa College prepared students for the lower-level Gyani and Vidvan examinations only while the M.A. classes remained under the control of the College, as before. Hindi and Sanskrit were looked after by the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College Jullundur, while Law was accommodated in an evacuee property there, after a brief sojourn in Shimla.

The political and educational leadership at the time was very sensitive to the needs of the underprivileged. Commerce classes were started in Dalhousie, but it was soon realized that the because of the high cost of living at the hill station, only the rich people could afford to send their children there. Accordingly, 1951 end, the Commerce College was also shifted to Jullundur and housed in an evacuee property. Early in 1949 the building of Government College Hoshiarpur was placed at the disposal of the University, under the name University College. The dual control did have some problems but the arrangement generally worked well. Two eminent later Vice-Chancellors of the University, Professors Ram Chand Paul and Ram Prakash Bambah both were at Hoshiarpur, though Prof. Paul had begun his career at Lahore itself. As early as 1951, the Central Government led by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru decided to build a new capital for the Indian Punjab. Interestingly Patiala made a generous offer of land to accommodate Panjab University there, but very farsightedly, the Government opted for a new campus in a new city.The various components of the University began assembling in Chandigarh 1958 onwards.

“Over some difference of opinion with the Chief Minister [Pratap Singh Kairon], Kumar retired from the Vice-chancellorship in 1957.” The various components of the University began assembling in Chandigarh 1958 onwards. The honour of leading the University from its elegant new home thus befell Dr Amar Chand Joshi, at the time Director of Public Instruction Punjab, whose tenure extended from 1 July 1957 to 30 June 1965. His successor was Mr Suraj Bhan, who was at the time of appointment the Vice-Chancellor of the newly founded Kurukshetra University.

The well-known chemist Ram Chand Paul (1919-2002) who held office for 10 and a half years, from 1974 till 1984 end, has been the longest serving Vice-Chancellor in the history of Panjab University. Born in Shakargarh ( now in Pakistan) he had his early education at Central Model School Lahore, and the Hindu and Khalsa Colleges in Lahore Amritsar. Since his father and the eldest brother both were doctors, he dutifully enrolled for MBBS. But since his first love was chemistry he abandoned medicine within a few weeks and joined Honours school in Chemistry at Punjab University. After passing his B. Sc. Honours School from Punjab University Lahore in 1939, he began research for the M. Sc. Degree under the guidance of Professor Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, with whom he published his first ever research paper. He obtained his (first) Ph. D. from the University in 1947 with Dr. S. D. Muzaffar as his thesis supervisor. In the meantime in 1944 he published a paper in the prestigious Journal of American Chemical Society, jointly with Muzaffar. This work in turn enabled him to obtain admission in Cambridge University in 1952 for his second Ph. D, which he earned in 1954 under the supervision of the internationally acclaimed inorganic chemist, Harry Julius Emeleus.

After serving the Punjab University and Panjab University as a Demonstrator, Lecturer and Reader, he went to Karnatak University Dharwar, as Professor only to return the next year to Panjab. Interestingly, the unsettled conditions in the University in the early days can be seen from his long list of publications which has a conspicuous gap for 1948 and 1949. Professor Paul was succeeded by his colleague from the Hoshiarpur days, Professor Ram Prakash Bambah who held office from 1 January 1985 till June 1991.

The will of Dyal Singh Majithia which vested The Tribune in a public trust was probated by the Lahore Chief Court on 19 April 1900. The matter was then taken to the Privy Council which upheld the probate on 5 August 1903. Without waiting for the outcome of the legal proceedings, the objectors to the will hatched a conspiracy to take The Tribune out of the Dyal Singh fold and dispose it off to a private individual as a fait accompli. How the plot was thwarted deserves to be better known.

There are times when life follows the script of a thriller. This happened more than 100 years ago in the case of the emergence of The Tribune as an independent paper after its proprietor’s death. Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia (1848-1898) who described himself as ‘Rais, Jagirdar and Land and House Proprietor of Lahore’ came into great landed inheritance thanks to the services rendered by his grandfather and father to Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Very prudently Dyal Singh employed the feudal money to generate commercial money through investments in real estate and trade in gems.

Dyal Singh was ‘an admirer and supporter’ of the Brahmo movement. Although in Punjab Brahmo Samaj speedily lost ground to the more militant and broad-based Arya Samaj, it did constitute a small but valuable intellectual resource comprising Bengalis and a handful of well educated Punjabis. Since Dyal Singh had no children he decided in consultation with his friends and advisors to vest most of his immovable and movable property in three public trusts, one for The Tribune, in existence since 1881, and the other two for a proposed College and Public Library both subsequently named after him. The three executors of the will, Jogendra Chandra Bose, Charles Golak Nath and Harkishen Lal, were all advocates or pleaders. They were also named trustees of The Tribune and made members of the other two, larger, trusts as well. A member of Dyal Singh’s inner circle who was placed on the College trust was Ruchi Ram Sahni, then assistant professor of science at Government College Lahore. Sahni joined The Tribune Trust in 1919 a year after retirement and remained in office till his death in 1948.[1]

Dyal Singh’s last will was opposed tooth and nail by his relatives especially his estranged Amritsar-based wife Rani Bhagwan Kaur and to a smaller extent by the Karachi-based ‘Mrs Lily Catherine Gill’, ‘an East-Indian lady, claiming to have been married to the deceased’. ( Majithia as the last name is a geographical indicator; Dyal Singh’s clan name was Gill or Shergill.) An application for probate of the will was made by the executors on 18 February 1899. A two-judge Civil Court examined the matter at length rejected the contentions made by the objectors and granted the probate on 19 April 1900.[2] Bhagwan Kaur then took the matter to the judicial committee of the Privy Council which dismissed her appeal on 5 August 1903. [3]

The objectors claimed that the will was technically defective; that Dyal Singh was not in a fit state of mind at the time of the writing of the will; and that because of his heterodoxy and unconventional lifestyle he had ceased to be a Hindu and therefore the Hindu Succession Act was not applicable. All these points were anticipated by the will’s propounders. An elementary precaution was taken by Dyal Singh himself. He thus insisted on having as witness two high officials of Lahore: William Ronaldoon Clark, Civil Surgeon; and Charles Henry Tilson Marshall, Divisional and Sessions Judge. When Dyal Singh died ‘very great care was taken to give prominence to Hindu rites and usages in connection with the funeral ceremonies. Akhand Path was conducted, but no Sikh or Brahmo rites were observed’.[4] (Dyal Singh had cut his hair and smoked publicly.)

Legal precautions were necessary but not sufficient. Ground realities had to be faced squarely. Ruchi Ram had ‘the mournful satisfaction of being present by his bedside during his last illness’. As soon as Dyal Singh breathed his last Ruchi Ram and a friend, Sangam Lal[5], locked and sealed ‘the principal rooms, where we thought the account books and valuable documents would be kept’, and decided to spend the night on the front thara of the house. Dyal Singh’s loyal servants led by his treasurer Bhanga Singh came to attack Ruchi Ram and his friend, but the latter ‘succeeded in appeasing them by asking them to put their own locks and seals in addition to ours’.[6] How entangled the case was can be gauged from the fact that Dyal Singh College finally came up in 1910, that is 12 years after the benefactor’s death. While the College and the Public Library were into the future when Dyal Singh died, The Tribune was very much in existence. The first task of the will’s propounders was to make sure that The Tribune did not fall into wrong hands.[7]

Rani Bhagwan Kaur entered into a nefarious agreement with one Sultan Bux promising to pay him the substantial amount of a few lakh rupees if he helped obtain physical possession of Dyal Singh’s properties independently of the court verdict .The Tribune press at the time was located in a rented house. Its manager was Ram Chand who had joined service in 1883 and was a loyalist. The editor Nagendra Nath Gupta entered into an underhand deal with Sultan Bux whereby Gupta would hand over The Tribune to the Rani if she later sold it to him for 10000 rupees. This intelligence was brought to Harkishen Lal by Ram Chand who was asked to play along. Rani’s minions were asked to come on the afternoon of a fixed day when the possession would be given to them. Harkishen who was at the time working as a vazir of the Raja of Sheikhupura brought about 15-18 servants of the Raja. On his part Ruchi Ram supplied three or four hands from the instrumentation workshop that he ran. These about 20 people were hidden in the bushes in front of The Tribune office. Harikishen, Ruchi Ram and others arrived in the office an hour before the time given to Rani’s men. Ruchi Ram was now given the task of bringing the editor out of the building on some pretext and keeping him engaged for about quarter of an hour.

Playing the part to the hilt Ruchi Ram entered Nagendra Nath’s office and into a discussion on some topic. In the midst of the conversation Ruchi Ram got up and both came leisurely out of the house and stood in the compound under a tree. In the meantime Harkishen Lal, Ram Chand and their men entered the building and instructed their staff to vacate the building which was then locked.

When the operation had been successfully carried out Harkishen Lal waved a handkerchief as a pre-arranged signal. Nagendra Nath was now permitted to go in to discover that he had been outwitted. Half an hour later, when Sultan Bux ‘accompanied by ten to twelve stalwarts and two or three servants of the Rani’ arrived he flew into impotent rage at what had happened. For the next two days and nights the place was guarded by about ‘20 strong men’. Arrangement was made for additional strongmen to come in sufficient number in case the other party launched an attack. However nothing whatsoever happened. The Tribune was now securely in the hands of the executors of the will. When the probate was taken the executors handed over the charge to themselves as the trustees of The Tribune. Not surprisingly, the editor Nagendra Nath Gupta was dismissed from service.//

[1] Ananda Prakash (1986) A History of The Tribune, p. 314 ( Chandigarh: The Tribune Trust).